At June 28 Coinbase published a report on Medium tagged “The United States of Crypto”. We might expect that this crypto-behemoth, which naturally possesses a plethora of statistical data about state of US peoples’ “relationships” with digital money, would come out with something very deep. Not this time, however.
In fact this piece is almost void of a meaningful content and I won’t recommend to spend your time on reading it except a couple of things: 1) it says that “… more than 70 percent of US States have enacted legislation that addresses cryptocurrency or blockchain.” and 2) “The top 10 US States for percentage of the population that owns crypto are: California, New Jersey, Washington, New York, Colorado, Utah, Florida, Alaska, Nevada, and Massachusetts.”
“70%” is a bit difficult to comment without researching this subject more thoroughly. However, I presume that this “addressing cryptocurrency” authors mentioned includes, primarily, various tax provisions enacted by many US states (like Kansas and Missouri) in a period of 2014–2015. Only very few states (like Montana) have ever dare to introduce something like “pro-crypo” amendments to local laws.
As to the “top 10 US States” in terms of owning crypto there’s a notable correlation between states’ median household income and its position in this list. New Jersey ($80,088), Massachusetts ($77,385), Alaska ($73,181), California ($71,805), Washington ($70,979), Colorado ($69,117), Utah ($65,358) and New York ($64,894) are among top 15 US states by this parameter (with Nevada ($58,003) and Florida ($52,594) being two exceptions).
In 2017 Nevada (with its Senate Bill №398) became the first US state to ban local governments from taxing blockchain use, so it’s, probably, not surprising that crypto is so popular in NV. As to Florida, which prior to “Florida v. Espinoza” was counted among the most “crypto-friendly” states, the situation might soon change there as FL legislators and enforcers are gradually becoming more and more “vigilant”.
Overall, this “report” might be viewed as an attempt of Coinbase PR department to exploit “4th of July” patriotic frenzies in order to conquer hearts (and, of course, purses) of US main-stream Internet users.
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